Too much information?

The value of accumulating, storing and recalling knowledge in the form of facts is under assault from connectivism, a learning theory that takes as its starting point the existence of technology and networks that have allowed us access to vastly increased volumes of information stored elsewhere. Add to that the awareness that knowledge itself is distributed, is growing exponentially, and bits of knowledge stand to be added to, transformed and rendered redundant ever more quickly – creating a world in which the “half-life” of knowledge appears to be reducing.

In such a world, why bother trying to digest and commit to memory information that stands to be overtaken in any case, especially when our digitally connected world allows instantaneous access to the most up to date information held elsewhere? Knowing lots of things appears to be very twentieth century. Knowing where to find things is surely the basis of twenty-first century life.

This is not unconnected with the orthodoxy that young people today cannot expect to be trained for a single career that they will hold throughout their working lives. The implication is that there is no fixed stock of knowledge that they need to imbibe early and call on over the long term. The premium now is on flexibility, conceptual agility, and transferrable skills.

This view of learning lines up well with progressive educational approaches that see learning as an active process, directed by the student, rather than a top-down didactic process of transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student; the latter, no matter how bright, performing passively vessels to be filled. In the more dynamic model what is being taught (content) is less important than the way it is being learned (skills).

But in a digital information environment in which networks hold the information, there is a danger that the individual begins to act a bit like a ‘thin client’ in computer terms: relying much less on the data stored in the local memory, and much more on the ability to connect with knowledge stored elsewhere. Processing power becomes distributed, and is lost to the individual.

But as learners we are not merely repositories of information. We don’t just store data. If we did, having access to other data stores would do just as well. As learners we are taught to hone the tools to interpret facts, to test their truth value, to compare them and make links, to build chains of reasoning, to draw conclusions, to engage others in debate. Without those skills, knowledge is moot. Skills are crucial in breathing operational life into the world of data. Diane Ravitch has shown convincingly that the development of higher order cognitive skills depends on having knowledge to work on. You cannot practise these skills in a vacuum.

We seem to appreciate this intuitively. People still value actually knowing things, rather than just knowing where to find facts on demand. The thirst for knowledge apparently remains unquenched – if the continued popularity of quizzes in the pub, at works dos, on the Internet and TV, and even on the margins of formal education, are anything by which to go.

Here’s another question (though admittedly not one recommended for a quick-fire fingers-on-buzzers round): when did the value of knowing things become the leitmotif of educational reactionaries? When did this kind of knowledge become the presumptive preserve of the Right?

It is a shame that the ‘primacy of knowledge’ has been suborned by self-appointed keepers of the factual flame, who seek to roll back what they see as the advances of progressive education in recent decades. In the USA, E D Hirsch sounded the clarion call of core knowledge. In the UK, Michael Gove took up the charge with his devotion to dates. Daisy Christodoulou made committing facts to memory a sine qua non of sound education. None of this is new, of course. Hard Times’s Thomas Gradgrind cleared the path: “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts…”

So many straw men must surely constitute a fire hazard. Those who seek to turn the tide of progressive education assume that the latter is opposed to the learning of demanding amounts of hard curriculum content. Actually, though, progressivism’s target was the didactic, ‘chalk and talk’ style of pedagogy which treated students, no matter how bright, as mere vessels to be filled. Information itself has become a collateral victim of the counter-attack.

But the slur has persisted. Factual knowledge and content-filled curricula have been set successfully against a vision of student-centred discovery learning based on constructivist epistemology; a compound construct that is supposed to have infected education and dragged down standards. Opponents are caricatured as liberals who lowered the bar, replacing demanding knowledge-based curricula with wishy-washy relativistic models of negotiated learning, celebrating the undermining of authority. In the eyes of the factual fundamentalists, sixties progressivism has segued into the 21st Century Skills agenda.

By a Manichean sleight of hand, it was even possible to cast the world in terms of two opposed camps: knowledge versus skills – skills being seen euphemistically as the agents of dilution, giving in to lowest common denominator attempts to level the playing field by giving time over to directionless, content-less project-based cross-curricular ‘learning’. By a strange elision, progressive educationalists became the enemies of promise, selling out less advantaged students, those less immersed in cultural capital.

Except that this is all figment, not fact.

Factual knowledge, like patriotism, was never the exclusive domain of the Right. Indeed, knowledge has long been the ally of emancipation, transformative not just of individuals but also of societies. The auto-didacts of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew this. Working-class men, and women of all classes, knew this. Successive generations of migrants to these shores have known this.

Facts are not reactionary. An emancipatory curriculum is not centred on skills, but on facts, on information – and on learning what to do with it. It is demanding, because it is effective. It is based on what Michael Young calls “powerful knowledge”. In a democracy, everyone has a right to knowledge – the knowledge necessary to make reasoned judgements. In a meritocracy, everyone should have the right to the same building blocks of knowledge.

No single political or educational grouping has a monopoly on the importance of facts, of knowledge narrowly defined. Rather than ceding the territory of knowledge and buying still more stock in free-standing ‘skills’, those who share a broad and balanced vision of transformative, emancipatory liberal education should fight to reclaim facts and knowledge, and not shy away from hard and demanding content in curriculum.

So between the vacuous “no-nothing” claims of connectivism, and the Grandgrindian slog of hard-core educational reductionists, there is a land of liberal learning to be conquered anew by each generation, a land in which knowing how to find things is a skill; but knowing things is a human right.

...knowing how to find things is a skill; but knowing things is a human right.